Soil and Landscape Grid National Soil Attribute Maps - Pedogenons (3" resolution) - Release 1

This map gives a modelled estimate of the spatial distribution of Pedogenon soil classes across Australia.

Pedogenon mapping is a method for stratifying the landscape (similar to soil-landscape units), which can be used to assess past soil change with a space-for-time substitution approach.

Pedogenon classes are a conceptual taxa that aim to define groups of homogeneous environmental variables. These groups are created applying unsupervised classification to a set of state variables, proxies of the soil-forming factors for a given reference time. The assumption is that the soil-forming processes within these classes (i.e., pedogenons) have been relatively similar over pedogenetic time and thus have developed soils with similar properties. Pedogenon classes can afterwards be divided into subclasses along a gradient from less (i.e., remnant pedogenons) to more anthropogenic pressure on soils (i.e., pedophenons), in an analogous way to the concept of genoform and phenoform (Rossiter and Bouma, 2018). The assessment of changes in soil condition can be done with a space for time substitution within and across pedogenon classes. The conceptualization and methodology for pedogenon mapping and using the classes as basis to assess changes in soil condition are explained with more detail in two publications (Román Dobarco et al., 2021a; Román Dobarco et al., 2021b).

Detailed information about the Soil and Landscape Grid of Australia can be found at - SLGA.

• Period (temporal coverage; approximately): 1950-2022;
• Spatial resolution: 3 arc seconds (approx 90 m);
• Number of pixels with coverage per layer: 2007M (49200 * 40800);
• Data license : Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY);
• Target data standard: GlobalSoilMap specifications;
• Format: Cloud Optimised GeoTIFF;

Credit
We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

This work was jointly funded by CSIRO, Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) and the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
We are grateful to the custodians of the soil site data in each state and territory for providing access to the soil site data, and all of the organisations listed as collaborating agencies for their significant contributions to the project and its outcomes.

Purpose
The map gives a modelled estimate of the spatial distribution of Pedogenon soil classes across Australia.